Saida shrugs. “A bigger life maybe. He’s young.”
“He needs a wife. Not to be married is unnatural.”
Saida looks at him but says nothing. The old man makes a sound, of apology perhaps, or merely confusion at the strange new world in which he finds himself.
Ten minutes later Ramzi comes back again, and the day continues as all their days do, serving the customers who are only plentiful around lunchtime when they come in for falafels and kebbé of lamb or chicken. The rest of the time Ramzi makes plans behind his newspapers, Elias revisits grief-salted dreams of the past behind his, and Saida cleans, cooks, does the accounts and pays the bills.
At five-thirty, she hears someone come in and looks up from the ledger book, expecting Joseph, who is already late, but it is not her son. It is the tall American, thin as a drug addict, whom Saida has seen in the square. She thought he was a tourist at first, but it seems he lives nearby.
“Good morning,” she says. She decides when Joseph gets here she will skin him alive.
The man returns the greeting and nods to her father and brother. He orders a café crème and sits at the counter. Saida watches him. He does not look healthy. There are red blotches on his skin, such fair skin, and his coppery hair is dull. He has a good nose, though, straight and long. And his chin shows character and strength. He holds his hand up over his mouth when he is not drinking. He moves slowly, deliberately, as though he plans his movements in advance. It strikes her that he is someone who is working very hard to look relaxed.
Ramzi makes himself an espresso and sits down next to the American, flipping through a real estate paper from Montpellier. He runs his fingers down the page and picks at an ingrown hair on his jaw, near his ear. He makes small noises, which Saida knows indicate he would like to begin a conversation, but the man does not speak.
“You are American, yes?” Ramzi says, finally.
“Canadian.”
“Canada? But not from Montreal, your French …”
“Not very good, is it? No, I’m from the Maritimes. East of Quebec. By the sea. Nova Scotia. Pretty much all English.”
“That’s all right. We speak English. Don’t we?” Saida and Elias agree that they do. “My father insisted on our education. You never know where you will end up, do you? It is good to keep in practice. So we will speak English with you.”
“Fine,” says the Canadian and he smiles.
It is a good smile, Saida thinks. Not a smile that finds things funny, but a smile that tells the other person that they have done something good.
“You have been here before. You live on the square, yes? I have seen you. I am Ramzi. That is my father, and my sister.”
“Matthew.”
Ramzi and Matthew shake hands.
“America is a great country. Canada is the same, yes? Not like France. A man can get ahead in America. In France, it is a class system still. They say they kill off the aristocracy in their big revolution, but it is just a lie. You must be in one of their great schools, one of their great families—most of all, you must not be a Maghreb. You know this word?”
“North African,” says Matthew. He looks at a photo on the wall of the last remaining forest of Biblical cedars, the Arz Ar-rab, near Bcharré, and at another of the Qadisha Gorge where Maronite monasteries are cut into the rock. “But that’s Lebanon, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” says Ramzi, pleased. “We are Lebanese. But the French make no distinction.”
“Lots of racism in North America too.”
“If you have money, though, none of that matters, and you can get money in America. Here you are taxed to death. You cannot afford to hire anyone because of all the social security and health care and pension and such, and so you must do all the little work yourself and then you cannot make other plans. In America this is not the case.” Ramzi says this with absolute assurance. “I will not stay here in Paris. I do not wish to stay in France, but if I do, I will go to the south, to Montpellier. At least it is not so grey there all the winter. A man could die from lack of sun.”
In Arabic, Elias says, “Only the young have wings on their feet,” and Saida hates the sadness in his voice.
“My father says he is too old to move again.”
“Something to be said for staying in one place, I guess,” says Matthew, and Saida thinks he says this without conviction.
“And this is why you are not in Canada, yes?” says Ramzi with a grin. “Some of us are born nomads, I think.”
Matthew nods. “Some people are strangers wherever they go.” He smiles again.
“Have you been to Lebanon?” says Saida.
Matthew looks at her and there is something in his eyes that makes her sorry she asked the question, which suddenly does not seem as harmless as she’d thought.
“Yes. Beirut. In 1982,” he says and drops his eyes.
The silence in the café is quite loud then.
“We left in 1979,” says Ramzi, and then they wait. “We were in Damour.”
“I’m a reporter,” says Matthew.
“So, you know why we left, then,” says Saida.
Turning away into the kitchen alcove she busies herself cleaning the grill. She hears a noise and her son’s voice.
“Marhaba,” he says.
“You’re late,” she says, switching to Arabic.
“Not so much. A minute or two,” Joseph says, also in Arabic.
“Where are your books?”
“I went home first, that’s why I’m late.”
“I called the school this afternoon. They said you were not there.”
The way his eyes dart around the room, looking for a clue, an escape, gives him away.
“You shouldn’t check up on me. It is humiliating. I was there.”
“You want to add lying to your crimes?” He smells of cigarettes.
“What time did you call? I had to go to the pharmacy for aspirin. I had a terrible pain in my neck from sleeping on that couch. I might have stepped out and maybe that’s when you called.” He licks the mark on his lower lip. As he does whenever he lies.
“Stepped out?” Ramzi laughs. “The only pain in the neck around here is you!” He says it in English and looks pointedly in the direction of the Canadian. He uses a joking tone to diffuse the tension.
“What’s happening?” Elias looked from his son to his daughter to his grandson, but no one answers him.
“Who are you running with in the street?” Saida comes around the counter now and stands in front of Joseph. She barely comes up to his shoulder. Her son is tall, like Habib. Strong through the arms and chest like him, too, and now he crosses his arms, making the muscles bigger. Only his eyes are his mother’s. She stares into eyes so much like her own, dark-rimmed, but bright with anger. “What are you doing? Picking pockets on the metro? Smoking dope?”
“No!” he says.
“Where do you go—out to the banlieue? Your so-called friends are criminals?” Her hands fly like birds.
“My friends are my friends.”
“And your family? What are we?” Fingers spread wide as though she would take hold of him.
“Saida, keep your voice down,” says Ramzi, and flicks his eyes again toward the Canadian, whose own gaze is fixed firmly on his coffee cup. “You’re embarrassing our customer.”
“Oh, forgive me! God forbid! Of course, that’s more important than your nephew. Fine. You deal with him, this tough man who skips school and lies.”
“You didn’t call the school. You lied,” says Joseph.
“Joseph! You will not call your mother a liar. Apologize. Now,” says Elias.
For a moment it is not clear if he will or not, and his uncle glares at him. “Joseph,” he cautions.
“I’m sorry.”
“Take your grandfather to the doctor, Joseph. We will talk at home. Go right back there. Your grandfather will call me and tell me. You will stay with him. Do your homework. Do some homework.”
“What’s going on
?” says Elias. “Am I going to the doctor? Why so much shouting? Joseph, you are a good boy, aren’t you?”
“Yes, Jadd. Don’t worry,” says Joseph and he goes over to the old man and kisses him.
Saida’s heart burns in her chest.
“Sorry,” says Ramzi to Matthew. “The boy, he misses his father.”
“You think he misses his father?” says Saida.
“Well, Anatole.”
“That man is not his father! His father is dead,” says Saida in Arabic. If there was a pot within reach, Saida might very well have tossed it at her brother. “Anatole was never his father. Don’t you dare say such a thing!” She glances at the Canadian and thinks it is to his credit that he says nothing.
“Have some tea with me,” says Elias and motions to the boy to sit down.
“Do I have time?” he says to his mother, this time in English.
“If you’re fast,” she says and turns to boil the water. She shrugs. “Dr. Allouche always keeps you waiting at least forty-five minutes.”
“Joseph, come and meet our new guest,” says Ramzi. “This is Mr. Matthew. He is from Canada. A reporter.”
They shake hands and Joseph is full of smiles. “Have you been to New York?”
“New York is not in Canada, Joseph,” says Ramzi and slaps him lightly on the arm.
“I know that, but it is close. I love New York. I want to go there one day. Have you been?”
“Yes. Many times.”
“Cool. Brooklyn Bridge. Times Square. Best rappers in the world come from Bronx.”
“All that,” says Matthew, nodding. “A lot of good jazz, too.”
“Yes, jazz is good music. American Black music. So, you’re a reporter. What kind of reporter?”
“Good question. I go where they send me. I report on conflicts.”
“On wars, then. Les points chaudes.”
“Yes.”
“What wars?”
“Drink your tea, Joseph. You have to go in a minute,” says Saida. “Don’t be so nosy.”
“It’s all right,” says Matthew, and then to Joseph again, “I guess I’ve been to most of the wars in the past twenty years.”
“Cool.” The word is long, drawn out, and accompanied by head nodding.
“You think so, eh?”
“Sure. You get to be where history is making. See the truth of things.”
“I guess.”
“You in Iraq during the Desert Storm?”
“Yup.”
Matthew begins to talk about being in the Rashid Hotel, about the bombs that fell, the whining thunder they made, about the great fires in the desert. Saida does not listen to the words which, being about war, sound like obscenities to her ears. Instead, she watches the two. Saida likes the way Matthew talks to her son. As though he were an adult, an equal. And she can see from the look on Joseph’s face, the way he leans in to talk to the man and listens attentively to his tales, that Joseph is basking in the attention. He does miss his father, she thinks—or at least a father. Misses Anatole, does he? Misses the beatings. Misses the drunkenness. Misses being told he is good for nothing, useless, born only for the garbage dump. What is that to miss?
“Enough, Joseph,” she says at last. “It’s time.”
When her son and father have gone she goes into the open courtyard across which is the toilet. She scrubs the sink and mops the floor. The rain has stopped now and she takes a moment to pick weeds out of the potted plants. There are a few late roses on the vine and if she dead-heads the old, perhaps there will be a few more. She likes to be here, in the open, with the miniature garden. It is her thinking place.
Her father thinks she should marry again. A nice Lebanese man this time, not a foreigner he said, as though they were not the ones who were foreign, as though it was not her father’s idea that a Frenchman, albeit a Corsican, would make them less strange here. They would integrate, become family here, her father had thought. Well, she has had enough of that. Besides, who would want a woman like her now, a widow and a divorcee with skin melted into shapes like pale mud over which many feet had walked? No, her son would have to be content with conversations with strangers, with a grandfather, with an uncle. This was why she has moved back to her father and brother and not gone off with her son, somewhere else, somewhere where a woman alone was not always tied to the belt of the men in her family.
That night, when at last she can sit and talk to Joseph alone, she means to talk to him as well about the school he has skipped, about the boys he runs the street with, but it is a good moment between them, and instead she talks about the Canadian.
“I liked his stories, didn’t you?” she says.
Joseph shrugs. “They were okay.”
He admits nothing to her, his mother. He falls asleep watching the television and she does not have the heart to wake him again. Tomorrow, she says to herself, putting the duvet over him and a pillow under his head. When she kisses him, he smells sharp, but sweet as well, like cinnamon and dates.
CHAPTER EIGHT
That night Matthew returns home after consuming a great deal of beer at the Bok-Bok. He lies in bed and considers the Ferhat family. Saida is a pretty woman. Her dark eyes are arresting, one might even say haunting, lit with sorrow, yes, but also with dignity and intelligence. Good bones, as they say, although it’s obvious from the way she shields her scars that whatever happened to Saida has left her feeling unlovely, which is such a shame. Matthew likes the boy, who is growing into his skin, pushing out to find the limits of things. It is a tough age, sixteen. Matthew knows that only too well. So many things can change, some irrevocably, others only feel that way. So many things cannot be changed.
Matthew’s own family lives in a carefully guarded compartment in his mind. It has been a long time since he has seen his father and brother, Bill, Jr. Bill has built a house on the same farm and lives there with his wife and three children. Matthew has never met his brother’s wife, nor his children, God help them. He has not seen a picture of them; has never heard their voice on the phone.
Matthew’s mother died two years after the barn burning. All her dreams of going to Halifax and studying to be a vet went up in smoke in that barn, as did her hope of a new life, away from her drunken, violent husband. She would not go so long as Matthew was still at home, but she had been planning. Saving a little here and there. Putting something aside for years, all the while trying to protect Matthew as best she could from her husband’s drunken rages. It was always Matthew. Never Bill, Jr., and the reason was simple enough: Bill, Jr. was the perfect clone of his father. However, with Matthew getting ready to go off to college, she had confided in him. Told him she was planning to leave, too. Somehow, her husband got wind of those plans.
The day after the barn burning, the town constable, the insurance man and the fire marshal came to poke around and ask some questions. They all said there was no sense to things like this. Just plain fool bad luck. The insurance man asked if there was any motive for his good friend Bill Bowles to burn down his own barn. Matthew held his breath and stared at the man real hard, so he would know that hell, yes, there was a motive and just give him a moment alone without his father around and he’d sure tell him what it was. But then the insurance man shrugged, said, “There’s just no figuring,” and the men all looked solemn. A little later they had a drink together, Bill and Bill, Jr., and the constable and the fire marshal and the insurance man, and then the three men got back in the constable’s car and went away, beeping the horn in a friendly way as they turned onto the main road.
Later the man from the county came to haul away the animal carcasses. The air was still thick with the smell of burned horseflesh; all his life Matthew would be haunted by the image of the black, bloated bodies hanging from a back leg as the knacker man winched them onto the back of his truck. And then the knacker man, too, was gone and the three Bowles men were left alone in the yard, amidst the smoulder and the stench.
Bill Bowles spit on the g
round and then turned to look up at his wife’s ashen face, staring down at them from the upstairs window. “Nobody goes anywhere,” he said. “Not on my fucking watch.” And although it was not clear whether his mother could hear the words or not, the message was indisputably clear. Bill Bowles, Senior held the reins of power and he was not going to give them up. The curtain fell and Matthew’s mother’s face disappeared.
After that, his mother remained in her room, mostly. She did what she was told and said little and cried not at all, not after that first night. The two or three friends she had from church came by from time to time, but his mother refused to see them, and so gradually the intervals between visits lengthened and then they stopped altogether. His mother did not wash and she didn’t eat, or hardly anything, and then only when her husband threatened to force-feed her.
She was bent on dying. Had her mind set on getting out. One day she called Matthew into her room where she lay on the bed, a stick-doll under a faded quilt. “Get out now,” she said to him, trailing her finger along the most recent bruise colouring his face. “Don’t wait.”
But he could not, of course. Not as long as she would be left behind.
It took her a long time to die.
A week after she had been laid in the ground Matthew packed his duffle bag and, closing the door softly behind him in the middle of the night, headed for Halifax and whatever fate he found, vowing he would spend his life pointing a finger at the brutal tyrants of the world. He would make people listen. He would make them see. He would make them do something.
And what has he done?
People see. People know. And so what? They do not care. They cannot care. It would rock their view of the world too much. People think that if it is true, what he and others like him have to say about the world, then the world is too horrible, too terrifying to continue living in. And so they look, but do not see. Hear, but do not listen. Know, but will not admit. Admit. To let in. To permit access to. Like light.
Matthew rolls over, buries his face in the pillow and weeps. He weeps for a long time, and when he is done he reaches for the sleeping pills he keeps handy and takes more than he should.
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